Part 2: Faith in the flesh

Liberation, wholeness & the stories that make us

This is Part 2 from a series of personal essays about growing up in Southern Africa. You can read Part 1 here. Please note the following essay contains brief but graphic content.

My mother & artist, Tania Tamara

I am often struck by our capacity to hold unimaginable horror in one hand, alongside exquisite beauty in the other.

How do we continue to expose our palms’ tender flesh to life when our mortality is etched into their lines? How do we tolerate living inside worlds known only to us; the loneliness of our head shared with 7 billion others?

We are truly extraordinary beings. And not a day passes I don’t feel indebted to all the ways my body found magic in places no ounce of enchantment should have lived.

Have you ever taken a moment to appreciate all the ways you saved yourself? And just to be clear, these ways are not the things we love most about who we are…they are often the very thing we are trying to rid ourselves of. They are our dissociations, our intellectualizations, our control, and our care-takings. They are all the ways ache still mothers us.

There is a terrible misbelief in our world that says suffering is a sign that something is wrong. But I would like to argue that something inside us is still unloved. And what is truly loved, is free. Suffering is therefore not wrong, but directional; it shows us the only exit.

Let me tell you a story about how I came to be as I am…why I write with an imagination seeded by the same hand that sowed a field full of trauma. I owe my life to that field, and no longer seek flood or fire to eradicate what lives there, for I know now that it is too, where the most beloved wildflowers grow.

My mother was a floral artist. Everything from the bathtub to the dinner table became a holding place for her arrangements. I bathed with baby’s breath and ate in the company of hydrangeas. I went to school in a car so full of dried cotton, spinning gum, and sea lavender, that I discovered I could sink beneath the surface and miss school altogether.

Once, my mother came home from a flower auction in Johannesburg with two huge vans tailing behind her. She had left before daylight to buy a few bunches of flowers, only to have mistakenly bought a few boxes of flowers, with 50 bunches inside each.

My father’s monthly wage was then laid out in cut flowers upon the land, which took up over half an acre.

My mother patiently hung the bunches on chickenwire stretched across the garage roof, transforming it into an upside-down garden (image above). After dipping them in homemade essential oils, she delicately dried them on silica sand under the warm sun.

Although I loved watching her work tirelessly with dried flowers, there was something about the planted rose garden outside my bedroom window that captivated me.

Three rows of white, red, and saffron gold roses stood peeking into my room from their trellis’. I can still smell their sweet velvety scent blending with the baked thatch roof of our farmhouse. These flowers were different from the ones my mother worked with; they weren’t given the privilege of eternity but grew, blossomed, and eventually fell from view.

There’s something about a child’s mind that knows mortality as a friend. Perhaps this is because the place we were dipped into life still bears the marking of Mystery when we’re young. A Mystery that lingers for as long as it can within us before it fades and is forgotten in the hurry to be human.

One night while I lay restless, rough-soled feet dangling out from the side of the bed, my mother told me a story. It was about the rarest rose of all: the blue rose. It was so rare she’d never seen one in all her days working with flowers. But she’d heard about them and thought perhaps we’d find one in the garden one day.

This story had me falling asleep against the windowpane for weeks, trying to detect whether one of the new rose buds would burst open and reveal its mystical blue hue. I waited because even though I was a rationalist, I was always longing to be proven wrong.

I don’t remember much ethereal faith growing up, but I do remember things as if my God decided she would be the kind that lived inside unusual, tangible objects that I have since replaced over and over again, like offering a new shell to a mysterious sea creature.

And some things I found most beautiful in this world were often quite hideous to others, so many questioned my idea that god didn’t mind existing in the ugly.

Although I’ve had to learn selective blindness to live among others, it has been a blessing of whole-sightedness in a culture that celebrates only the partial, only the bonny.

The first time I saw Jesus was one of these hideously beautiful moments that made sense to no other.

We had stopped on the side of a motorway for a toilet break, and as I crouched down behind a bush, I noticed a small ragdoll thrown haphazardly against the dirt. It had a constellation of toothpicks impaled into its hay-stuffed body, a cropping of burnt horsehair sprung from its head, and someone had sewn its mouth and eyes shut. I remember feeling desperately sorry for her.

My mother, who was always careful to stay friends with all gods, told me not to touch the ill-fated doll, and we hurried back into the car.

When I arrived on my first day of school, I saw a similar figure hanging on a white cross in the center of a traffic island. As we circled him, I noticed that he too, had been punctured in ill-will, eyes shut to the world and isolated by a stream of busy cars.

It is taboo to speak of Jesus as a voodoo doll. But behind both lives the will of another. Both their fates were bound by something else, their bodies but sacrificial lambs.

It’s the commonalities in duality that I have always found fascinating. Removing boundaries has always been a personal rebellion against concrete concepts such as innocent or guilty, trauma or healing, freedom or incarceration.

Can you remember when the world was undivided, when Mystery’s marking burned hot against your skin while others told you that the world is this way and this way only? Can you remember the internal friction as you learned to go against your own wild grain?

Can you remember your natural capacity to hold both the pain and the miracle in the same embrace?

This is how we saved ourselves then and can redeem ourselves now by remembering our whole-sightedness; there is always our inner beauty in the kernel of external horror.

One night on our flowerbed farm, I woke suddenly to the rage of two strangers inside our home. They had broken in through a tiny single-pane window in the kitchen and were trying to pry open the indoor gate that separated our bedrooms from the rest of the house.

All I saw was the sudden flash of my father as he ran past my bedroom door in pursuit of the men who managed to jump back through the shattered window while he unlocked the door. I will never forget seeing my father’s pinstriped pajamas disappearing into the kind of darkness you only get in rural towns, as the blade of his small hand axe glinted against the moonlight. I had only ever seen it stashed underneath his mattress, a normality against the backdrop of a violent and segregated country.

I crept into the hallway and saw blood smeared across the walls like ancient cave paintings longing to tell a desperate story. My siblings and I were ushered quickly back into bed, while my mother sandwiched the phone between her shoulder and ear.

We all huddled under my duvet, hearts beating out of our small chests, the voice of my mother outside my door, a single thread still tethered as the delicate tapestry of my mind unraveled.

After a while, hot breath lulling us back to sleep, I peeked my head out into the cold room and looked through the open curtains across the rows of roses, who seemed unperturbed by it all.  

And there, nestled among tight, white buds and under the light of the full moon, a newly unfurled rose hung its glorious blue head.

Inside this body of yours is the grace of being able to save yourself. Some might call this a coping mechanism or a trauma response, but if you dare to see the whole, you might also see the miracle of who you really are.

It’s only in forgetting that you are greater than that which saved you, that you live only partially sighted, mothered by an innocence that eternally waits for permission to go out and play with Mystery.

Can we understand the truth of our past as being both dark nights and the rose that unfurled from within them? Even if our blue rose exists now as a disorder, a depression, a procrastination, an unrelenting restlessness, rage… we cannot leave behind what is still unloved and we cannot truly love what we do not intimately know.

I tell this story to the one who sees the past as black and the future as white, forgetting that they are what lies in between. For the one who refuses to see anything at all because they believe blindness will save them from the pain. For the one who believes god can’t possibly live in ugly things. For the one who holds one hand behind their back, only willing to hold one.

I want you to know that even in the hours that stretch out long and thick, like oil spilled across deep water, that you are what’s underneath. And that the whole of who you are is what you came here to remember - without negating the human for the divine, nor the dual nor the One, nor the trauma for the healing - for in truth, we cannot separate any of it.

Choose to see the past as a whole, knowing you are the wholeness you see within it, and you will realize that you were never fractured, beloved.

You were truly remarkable.

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